Climate Change Clouds Philippines’ Dream of Rice Self-Sufficiency

A flooded market in the farming town of Novaleta, near Manila, on Aug. 19.

Climate change will complicate the Philippines’ efforts to become self-sufficient in rice, the country’s economic planning secretary said Monday.

Arsenio Balisacan said preliminary data showed that 74% of the estimated damage from natural disasters in the country last year came in the farm sector, primarily affecting rice. The natural disasters include extreme weather caused by global warming, he said.

“We expect these extreme events and unpredictable phenomena to become the new normal,” Mr. Balisican told a workshop on efforts to address the impact of climate change in agriculture.

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“For instance, supertyphoon Yolanda, internationally known as Typhoon Haiyan, damaged about 600,000 hectares of agricultural lands, with an estimated 1.1 million metric tons of crops lost,” said Mr. Balisacan, who previously worked for the Department of Agriculture.

Haiyan was the deadliest storm in the modern history of the Philippines, claiming close to 6,200 lives and displacing four million people.

As recently as 2008, the Philippines was the world’s biggest importer of rice, buying more than two million tons from overseas. Increased investment in irrigation and better rice seeds allowed the country to reduce imports and hope for rice self-sufficiency this year.

The Philippines needs to harvest at least 19.03 million tons rice to achieve self-sufficiency. Apart from a brief period in the 1970s, when the country stepped up its rice-production program, the Philippines has been a net rice importer for the past five decades, in part because it was cheaper to buy rice from Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand than produce it locally.

In December, the government’s grains agency decided to import an additional 500,000 metric tons of rice to supplement local inventory depleted by Haiyan relief work.

The Asian Development Bank has identified Southeast Asia as one of the world’s most vulnerable regions to climate change because of its long coastlines, the concentration of people and economic activity in coastal areas, heavy reliance on agriculture for livelihoods and high dependence on natural resources.

The ADB said the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam could each need to spend $5 billion a year by 2020 on climate change adaptation measures such as flood-control projects.

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